Pages

Monday, January 09, 2012

Following my previous post, found the following article I wrote for the NME under the name Dick Tracy, published in the issue dated 6th September 1980

PLASTIC PEOPLE 1969

Bohemian Raps

A reader recently wrote to NME asking 'Who hasn't heard of The Plastic People?' Answer: A lot of Czechs who aren't allowed to.

"GENUINE artists have always been those who have drawn attention to the fact that things are not in order. This is why one of the highest aims in art has always been the creation of unrest." - Ivan Jirous.

ON 1st July 1980 Karel Soukup was arrested in Prague and charged with "singing various songs of anti-socialist content, ridiculing the police, especially the State Security, and using vulgar expressions in his songs" at the wedding party of a friend.

Far from an isolated incident, Soukup's arrest was the latest in a solid onslaught of such incidents stretching back ten years, which have centred round a group of musicians who have refused to conform.

The Plastic People Of The Universe, despite harassments, arrests and imprisonments, have succeeded in maintaining a true underground culture in Czechoslovakia. Their message is clear: it is better not to play at all than to play as the establishment demands.

The first Czech band was The Primitives in 1967, who drew on The Fugs, Zappa, Beefheart and The Doors as inspiration. The Plastic People themselves came together only a few weeks before the Russian invasion in 1968 and have been a thorn in the side of the establishment ever since.

For a while they were tolerated but in 1971 a crackdown began and a new licensing system for bands was introduced. The following were not allowed: English lyrics, English names for groups, long hair, eccentric dress, high volume, pessimism, funk.

Rather than compromise, the Plastic People went underground, even to the point of building their own sound equipment. Around their creative centre, singers, poets and artists got together to produce a stream of samizdats, clandestine exhibitions, secret concerts. One statement reads:

"The aim of the underground here in Bohemia is the creation of a second culture. A culture that will be totally independent of official channels of communication, social recognition and the hierarchy of values dictated by the establishment."

PPU ve zkušebně v Holešovicích, roku 1972

In 1973 two new groups were spawned — Midsummer Night's Dream and DG307 (named after Diagnosis 307, a term used by the official regime for 'psychiatric disturbance') — but that same year saw the first arrests.

Ivan Jirous, artistic director of The Plastic People, was jailed for 10 months — for "insulting a member of the secret police in a pub".

The first big bust came in February 1976 at Jirous' wedding. Police raided the party, searched homes, seized tapes and arrested 19 people, who were charged with breach of the peace. Twelve were released after six months investigative custody while seven others were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to eighteen months, in the case of Jirous. He was arrested again in October 1977 and sentenced to eight months in April 1978. This was increased to 18 months upon appeal.

Further official restrictions on music were revealed in Document 13 from the famous group of Czech dissidents known as Charter 77. This states: "A number of magazines dealing with popular music have been banned outright. Certain popular music critics ... are not allowed to publish articles or lectures on pop music. All newspapers are provided with lists of performing artists that they may or may not write about, and they are even told, in some cases, how they must write about them."

The first Plastic People album, recorded in a Czech castle, produced in France, pressed in Ireland and printed in England, is now available through Rough Trade.

Called 'Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Band' (after the radical Czech poet whose work is featured on the album), it's disturbing music. The LP also contains a fat booklet entitled The Merry Ghetto which comprises poems and samizdats from the underground.

The sleeve notes read: "This record is not a cry of protest. It is a deliberate statement of what is possible, even in what seems an impossible situation." We need messages like this in these frightening times. Hopefully the People's second album, 'Passion Play', will also find a way to the West.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

THE GENERALIST has been bewitched by a movie, which has opened up a kind of Pandora’s box of thoughts and connections which this post will try and explore.

‘Closely Observed Trains’ (aka Closely Watched Trains). directed by Jiří Menzel. This Czech film was released in 1966 and won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1977.

The movie is set mainly around a small provincial railway station, peopled by a wonderful cast of characters, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The principal part of the plot concerns the almost heart-breaking saga of the new recruit to the station, who is trying lose his virginity. Sex and trains are a marvellous combination. There’s a spoiler entry about the film on Wikipedia which explains the outline of the plot but I’d recommend just seeing it. The black and white cinematography is really beautifully framed and lit. The film unfolds in an almost magical fashion. I like Bosley Crowther’s co0ntemporary crit:

"What it appears Mr. Menzel is aiming at all through his film is just a wonderfully sly, sardonic picture of the embarrassments of a youth coming of age in a peculiarly innocent yet worldly provincial environment. ... The charm of his film is in the quietness and slyness of his earthy comedy, the wonderful finesse of understatements, the wise and humorous understanding of primal sex. And it is in the brilliance with which he counterpoints the casual affairs of his country characters with the realness, the urgency and significance of those passing trains."

The film was based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), who also co-wrote the screenplay. Hrabal is a major writer of prodigious talent who is still little-known in the wider world. Much of his work has yet to be translated. These two are both short pithy works of great power, lashed with humour, full of vivid and unexpected scenes and remarkable flights of fancy.

Hrabal kept his ear close to the pub table. He sat for hours in his favourite Prague establishment, the Golden Tiger, listening to beer-fed stories foam. Those who knew him recall a man who liked to pass himself off as a beer-drinker rather than a writer, content to sit silently and gather – the community’s generous beggar.

…..a new way of writing, whereby heterogeneous elements could be forced against each other, in a natural, comic manner, arising out of ordinary human business rather than the obviously surreal.

Hrabal began to experiment with an unlimited, flowing style, almost a form of stream-of-consciousness (he admired Joyce, Céline and Beckett) in which characters associate and soliloquise madly. He called it pabeni, to which the closest approximation, according to Skvorecky, is ‘palavering’. This palavering is really anecdote without end. The lovely truancy with which Hrabal’s work vibrates has to do with its hospitality to an abundance of stories. Often, one senses that Hrabal has taken a brief comic tale heard in the pub, and exaggerated its comic essence.

On 3 February 1997, Bohumil Hrabal, sick and in despair, haunted by what he called his own ‘loud solitude’, and obsessed by the idea of ‘jumping from the fifth floor, from my apartment where every room hurts’, fell from the fifth floor of a hospital while he was trying to feed the pigeons.

Then what happened over the last eight weeks during which I not only watched the film twice but also got hold of Hrabal’s books and read them excitedly – while I was in the spell of all this – Vaclav Havel died and his state funeral was held and then, just yesterday, read this obituary of Josef Skvorecky in The Independent. For those who were there at the time and for those who weren’t, some history.

1968

THE PRAGUE SPRING

‘In the long run, the most noble of the "1968's" where not the French, German, British or American students and intellectuals; the real heroes of that time were Sakharov, Bonner, Landsbergis, Milosz, Kuron, Karpinski and Havel. They helped create a human rights movement that would spread throughout the Soviet bloc and discredit the tyranny. The 1989 revolution would not have been possible without them.’

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected the First Secretary of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were an attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel.

Czechoslovakia remained occupied until 1990.

1989

THE VELVET REVOLUTION

Vaclav Havel In Wenceslas Square in Prague

The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that took place from November 17 to December 29, 1989. Dominated by student and other popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, it saw to the collapse of the party's control of the country, and the subsequent conversion from Czech Stalinism to capitalism.[1]

On November 17, 1989, a Friday, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swollen from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated 500,000. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

With the collapse of other Warsaw Pact governments and increasing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 that it would relinquish power and dismantle the single-party state.

. On December 10, President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on December 28 and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989.

In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democraticelections since 1946.

VACLAV HAVEL

Vaclav Havel and Lou Reed (2005)

Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

A Nobel Peace Prize nominee,[2] he was the ninth[3] and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the firstPresident of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Dissident

During the first week of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel assisted the resistance by providing an on-air narrative via Radio Free Czechoslovakia station (at Liberec). Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. He was forced to take a job in a brewery, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience.

This play, along with two other "Vaněk" plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vaněk, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia, and greatly added to Havel's reputation of being a leading dissident (several other Czech writers later wrote their own plays featuring Vaněk).[12]

The Plastic People of the Universe was formed less than a month after the Soviet invsaion.

Bassist Milan Hlavsa formed the band which was heavily influenced by Frank Zappa ("Plastic People" being a song by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) and the Velvet Underground in 1968.[2]

Czech art historian and cultural critic Ivan Jirous became their manager/artistic director in the following year,[1] fulfilling a role similar to the one Andy Warhol had with the Velvet Underground. Jirous introduced Hlavsa to guitarist Josef Janíček,[1] and viola player Jiří Kabeš. The consolidated Czech communist government revoked the band's musicians license in 1970.[3]

Because Ivan Jirous believed that English was the lingua franca of rock music, he employed Paul Wilson, a Canadian who had been teaching in Prague, to teach the band the lyrics of the American songs they covered and to translate their original Czech lyrics into English. Wilson served as lead singer for "the Plastics" from 1970 to 1972, and during this time, the band's repertoire drew heavily on songs by the Velvet Underground and the Fugs.

The only two songs sung in Czech in this period were "Na sosnové větvi" and "Růže a mrtví", lyrics of both being written by Czech poet Jiří Kolář. Wilson encouraged them to sing in Czech. After he left, saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec joined the band and they began to draw upon Egon Bondy[2] whose work had been banned by the government. In the following three years, Bondy's lyrics nearly completely dominated PPU's music. In December 1974, the band recorded their first "studio" album, Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned (the title being a play on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), which was released in France in 1978.

In 1974, thousands of people travelled from Prague to the town of České Budějovice to visit the Plastics' performance. Stopped by police, they were sent back to Prague, and several students were arrested.[1] The band was forced underground until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Unable to perform openly, an entire underground cultural movement formed around the band during the 1970s. The sympathizers of the movement were often called máničky, mainly due to their long hair.

In 1976, the Plastics and other people from the underground scene were arrested and put on trial (after performing at the Third festival of the second culture) by the Communist government to make an example. They were convicted of "organized disturbance of the peace" and sentenced to terms in prison ranging from 8 to 18 months.[1] Paul Wilson was deported[3] even though he had left the band in 1972. It was in protest of these arrests and prosecution that led playwright Václav Havel and others to write the Charter 77.[3]

Thursday, January 05, 2012

‘Occupy: Scenes From Occupied America’ published by Verso was rushed out and into the bookstores before Xmas.

The book is an edited compilation of material from the first three issues of the Occupy Wall Street Gazette [see below] with contributions from some of the world’s leading radical thinkers includingSlavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

Much of the book captures the adrenaline and excitement of the Occupy actions in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston but also highlights the many problems. The consensus decision-making process on which most of the camps were run favoured people with time and patience but infuriated others. The drum circles, a feature of the camps, often drowned out the speakers and annoyed residents in the neighbourhood. The camps also became a refuge for scores of homeless people who found the sites safer places to be than the public shelters. Then there was the issue of how to deal with huge piles of discarded wet and dirty clothes which had to be trucked off the site and laundered elsewhere.

In a speech given by Žižek in Zuccoti Park on October 9th, he warned the Occupiers:

‘There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, “Oh, we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is, “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organisation can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?’

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Good New Year wishes to all my readers worldwide. Thanks to you, this year’s figures are almost greater than those of the last two years combined (2009/2010). Please keep spreading the word and I’ll keep pumping up the volume.